


and your bird can sing

by heather (shinyhappyfitsofrage)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (one musician AU), AU, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Guitars, musician au, not a songfic but inspired by music?, this is my aesthetic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-07 08:32:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6796789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinyhappyfitsofrage/pseuds/heather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>or; ten times she is sure he loves her</p><p>an au where everything is the same except they have music</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. gently

**Author's Note:**

> i was going to post all ten chapters in one go, but i realised its very likely i'll never finish this and wanted to at least get the parts i've finished out there before i do so.
> 
> the concept is inspired by and the chapter titles are borrowed from the tracklist of "rose ave." by You+Me. it's an amazing piece of music that everyone should listen to.

It begins with poker night.

Natasha had thought gambling was illegal in America but apparently poker is only illegal if money exchanges hands. To her, this seems idiotic. It’s not the act itself the government has a problem with but rather that someone is benefiting from it. She says this quietly to Clint and because he is already a beer in he laughs earnestly into the bottle.

Nevertheless, it does begin with poker night, when the rowdiness and the lights have gone down and only a few people, too tired or too drunk to walk back to their bunks, remain, lounging on the vaguely uncomfortable couches, reminiscing in low voices. Natasha listens, smiling when appropriate. She feels no great need to excuse herself and she supposes this must be what contentment feels like.

“Barton,” calls an agent, Hunter. “How ‘bout you get your guitar?”

Natasha blinks. Perhaps this is a drunk wild card demand. Clint is the sort of man who can shoot another man in the head point blank with a completely blank face, only to wake up sweating hours or days or years later. He can passably speak seven different languages and, if he were to be hanging off the edge of a building (which is more common than not), he would be able to lift himself to safety. He isn't the sort of man to play a guitar.

Her confusion doesn’t go unnoticed. “Natasha hasn’t heard you play,” Coulson says, a hint of elated realization in his voice. There is a collective gasp, and Natasha digs her shoulders deeper into the back of the sofa, uncomfortable. “You have to play now.”

There is a murmur of approval. Coulson turns off the stereo in anticipation.

The man of the hour shrugs, but Natasha notices the way his lip upturns slightly and she knows he’s enjoying this, like the way a person does when questioned about a new lover. “Oh, I don’t know… I’m sort of slightly drunk –“

“Come on, Barton -”

“Shut up, you know you wanna play –“

“Please –“

Clint is unable to hide a smile at this point. He glances to his left at Natasha, and raises his eyebrows. A smirk on her lips, she shrugs. She tries not to focus on the sudden flip in her stomach because of the insignificant way he looked at her, at the way he’d made it seem there was _them_ , and there was _her_. She watches as he leaves the room, a spring in his step. Then there is just her and the other S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. She looks back at them, unsure of what to say. They range from people who are nice to her because Clint’s her partner to complete strangers.

Eventually, she lets out a breath. “So, how bad is he?”

Morse, a woman Natasha only knew as Clint’s ex-wife and whom because of that she both distrusted and respected, shook her head. “He’s not.” There was no ounce of irony in her voice, and Natasha shifted in her seat.

The door swung open again; Clint reappeared, this time with a guitar slung around his shoulders. It was an acoustic and it was well-loved, both from the tired beauty of its physical shape and from the way Clint handled it. He sat down next to her, cradling it in his lap, and pulled out a pick. “What am I playing?” he asked as he tuned it. Natasha watched in fascination, at the way his fingers deftly plucked the strings and at the way he listened to it, leaning his head down ever so slightly to better hear the notes.

No one answers him. There are a lot of shrugs. “Anything,” says Coulson eventually.

“Love that song,” Clint says. Only a few people chuckle at his poor joke. After several moments he nods in relief. “Okay, I have one.” He turns to her. “Want to sing harmony?”

“What, you can sing too?” she asks, bewildered. More people laugh now, mostly good-naturedly, but Natasha still feels the need to brush her hair out of her face.

Clint looks smug. “Maybe. Want to sing along?”

She stares at him a second more, unsure of how seriously she needs to treat his request, before finally laughing lowly and letting her head fall against the back of the couch. “Yeah, okay. Like that will ever happen.”

“Suit yourself.” He wriggles around, getting comfortable with the guitar, and pulls out a guitar pick that was in his back pocket. Finally, he winks at her (and Natasha scoffs for a second time), raises his hand, and begins to play.

Her first thought is that she must be dreaming. This cannot be real. His hands are comfortable and strong and agile as they move up and down the frets, strumming the guitar with ease. The strings make clear, strong, beautiful sounds as he plays the beginnings of something soft and sweet, a lullaby maybe. It sounds like an ode.

And then he begins to sing, and Natasha is completely gone. She barely hears the words, instead focusing on the way the sound hits her ears and the way his throat moves with the song. She doesn’t wonder if she’s staring. She doesn’t care.

She _must_ be dreaming. This Clint, the low lighting, tender melody Clint doesn’t align properly with the Clint she knows, the one comprised of wisecracking and guaranteed kills (except once, of course). It’s as though she’s meeting him for that first time all over again. It’s as though she’s being _saved_ all over again.

The song ends eventually. She claps along with everyone else, but Natasha feels oddly hollow, and not the hollow feeling of something vital being missing, but hollow feeling of realizing something vital she’s never had. 


	2. second guess

“Who taught you?” asks Natasha one day, lying on her bed and watching Clint upside down as he plays something by Elvis. Her fatal mistake, she says under her breath to Laura many years later, was letting him catch on that she knew he was good. This is the fourth day that week he has barged into her bunk with his guitar slung over his shoulder and a cocky smile on his face. Now, he’s showing off, bobbing his head with the beat and every so often throwing her a smirk or a wink. But behind the self-centered swagger is true, genuine talent, and Natasha is at a loss as to the why.

Clint stops his playing mid-verse. “You’re impressed, huh?”

“If I say yes for the hundredth time this week, will you stop asking me?” She sits up, brushing her hair out of her eyes and taking another tortilla chip from the bag he brought her. “How did you learn?”

He shrugs, as if she’d asked him where he’d found a recipe for blueberry muffins. “Necessity. S.H.I.E.L.D. sent me undercover to protect this ambassador’s kid they thought was a target. He was sort of AWOL – the usual ‘my parents just don’t understand’ spiel – and was traveling the eastern seaboard as the lead singer in this really hard band. I went undercover as the back-up guitarist.”

“So, what?” Natasha stares at him, bewildered. “You just picked up a guitar one day and sounded –“ She throws her hands towards him, unable to describe how he sounds, unable to describe the way she only sort of can’t breathe and the way the guitar strings resonate with her blood, ringing in her ears for hours after he finishes. “Like that?” she eventually says, flustered.

Clint smiles, and stares at his guitar. She doesn’t know if it’s because he’s searching for words or if it’s because he’s found them and doesn’t know how to say them. He says, “I sort of knew how to play before. My… a good memory, the only good memory, basically, I have of my dad is sitting on my porch and him teaching me how to play guitar. Just basic stuff, you know. But, uh… he loved that guitar, and I think, I don’t know. When I was little, I used to practice all the time, behind the house, because I thought if I was any good…”

“You _are_ good,” says Natasha fiercely, overcome very suddenly by – by _something_. He looks up at her. She unclenches her first. “The _least_ you are is good, Clint.”

He laughs without humor – it’s more of a tired sounding exhale. “Still got the shit beat out of me, though.”

It’s quiet, doubly so because before the quiet there was music. Natasha doesn’t say anything (he doesn’t expect her to). She watches him as he runs his hand up and down the neck of the guitar absent-mindedly, feeling each fret, lost in songs played long ago. When he looks back up at her, Natasha folds her arms over her knees and gives him a quiet smile. “I’m glad you had that undercover gig.”

“Me too,” he says. He brightens, giving her an almost childishly exuberant look. “Hey! Wanna learn?”

“Come again?”

“Learn to play. I can teach you, it’s easy.”

Natasha laughs at the puppy-dog look in his eye (if he had given her that look in Russia in the alley in the cold, she wouldn’t have tried to shoot him). “Nice try, Barton.”

“Oh, come _on_ , Nat,” he almost whines, sitting down next to her and pulling the neck of the guitar into her lap. She tries not to squirm at how close he is, at her knee resting on his leg and at his shoulders brushing hers. “It’s easy.” He moves one hand to hover above hers. There is a moment of hesitation, and Natasha swears he swallows before taking her left hand and moving it to the guitar neck. He bends her fingers, carefully placing them in position on the strings. She gives up watching the guitar and instead watches him, at the quiet focus in his eyes and the something _more_. Natasha tries not to smile and she tries not to breathe and she mostly tries not to focus on the hammering under her rib cage. “Okay, push the strings down,” he says. She does, barely feeling the way the strings dig into her fingers. There are other things to feel. With his free hand, he raises it above the body and strums once. The notes are strong and sweet and clear.

“See, G chord,” says Clint. “It’s easy.”

In one fluid movement she kisses him, her hand abandoning the guitar to rest on his chest. He responds, and she likes the way his hand is in her hair suddenly, her curls twisted around his finger, and she likes the way he’s not playing but there’s still music, and she loves the way she is barely aware that this is the first time she’s kissed someone because _she_ wanted to –

Her hand slips and lands on the strings, and the room is filled with a harsh clash of notes. Clint laughs breathily, air hitting her nose, and he pulls back barely an inch, not looking away as he moves his guitar to the side. “Careful,” he says. “We’ll break it.”

“Is this how G chord always goes?” murmurs Natasha, smirking.

“This is better,” he assures her, and his hands are once again in her hair.


	3. from a closet in norway (oslo blues)

Natasha groans as she rolls back over onto her back – she’d thought her stomach would be more comfortable, and then she’d tried her side, and now she was at the beginning again, staring at the flecked ceiling. “I hate this. I hate this so much.” Clint, standing by the television and flipping through the channels with a level of focus similar to that he commits to his bow, doesn’t respond. Natasha glares at him. It has been almost twenty-four hours since she’s left this room and even the perfectly fluffed pillows and the nice chocolate from the mini-fridge had lost its appeal.

“Have you seen this episode?” he asks, gesturing to a Bulgarian drama on the television that he knows damned well she hasn’t seen. She flattens her lips and gives him a sarcastic half-smile. She’s even sick of Clint.

“I’m sick of you,” she informs him.

He has the audacity to snort at her. “Nice try, Nat. You love me.”

Her heart twists a little for reasons she forces herself to ignore. She continues with her list of complaints. “I am sick of this bed, I’m sick of the stupid Bulgarian television shows, I’m sick of the water that is only sort of hot, I’m sick of –“

“Extraction is coming,” he says.

“Who knows when.”

“Coulson says they’ll be here tomorrow.”

She shoots him a look. Yesterday Coulson had promised extraction today, and still they were trapped in the white painted room by the possibility of being spotted and by the police officers the mayor had paid off. “Tomorrow is a very ambiguous concept, Clint.”

He shrugs. “I guess so. But generally tomorrow means tomorrow.”

He was being an asshole on purpose now. Natasha resists the urge to throw a pillow at him and instead, shaking her head, crawls across the bed towards the bed. She folds back the covers and pulls them over her body, feeling the way the blankets slide over her newly shaved legs. “Wake me up if they get here.”

Clint looks almost amused. “You’re mad at me.”

“I’m mad at everything,” she mutters, wriggling deeper into the bed and turning on her side. She knows she is being irrational and childish and she doesn’t care. The whole hotel smells like petunias and the carpet is rough and she keeps flashing back to Sofia and the senator who’d paid for her hotel room for a week, who’d come to her again and again with a condescending smile, who wouldn’t let her leave until she finally buried her knife in his neck. She wishes she were back at home (and home is quickly becoming her bunk, Clint’s bunk, the sparsely decorated hallways of S.H.I.E.L.D.).

Clint stares at her, before turning off the television and coming to sit next to her, rubbing her left shoulder. She hums, relaxing slightly. “What are you going to do when we get back?” he asks. He’s trying to distract her. She rolls back over to look at him, raising an eyebrow. He needs a shave and his eyes are the sort of gentle tiredness that lovers at four am get.

“I am going to eat every clementine in the whole world,” she says with determination. The thought of the sweet tang almost makes her heart ache for the want of it.

“I’m going to tell Sitwell he is dickhead,” says Clint dreamily. “And then I’m going to hit him. And take his car.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well, you’re not going to eat every clementine in the whole world.”

“You don’t know that.” Natasha lets herself fall completely onto her back now, wriggling her shoulders into the mattress. She exhales, closing her eyes. “I am a person of very great ambition. It’s possible.”

He laughs quietly, into her hair. For a brief moment, she forgets that they are all but trapped in this lackluster room, in this bad tasting air, and that the shampoo doesn’t smell good and that the neighbors have sex loudly and often. It is just Clint laughing into her ear and the quiet whir of the ceiling fan and Natasha doesn’t mind being right there, right then.

“You know what I am going to do, though?” he asks. She hums in response. “I’m going to write you a song.”

Natasha opens her right eye, squinting it at Clint. “No, you’re not,” she says, but she’s uncertain. She rolls over onto her side to stare at him properly. It sounds like a joke and yet his tone is gravely passionate and he doesn’t look away from her when she stares at him.

“Yes, I am,” he says without missing a beat. “I’ve got some ideas already. When we get back I’m going to finish it. It’s subtle.” She gets the sense her lack of enthusiasm has suddenly made him nervous; he’s rushing through his words now and he’s flushed. “It’s not – it doesn’t say your name or anything, so if that’s why – I mean, it would just be our thing. You know?”

“Why?”

He shrugs. It’s both nothing and everything. Natasha rolls onto her back again and takes a deep breath. The flecks on the ceiling stand out like they hadn’t before. “Are you mad at me?” he asks.

She isn’t mad, but she is _something_ – it feels a little like being half-asleep, unable to discern between dreams and reality. A sense of déjà vu that she almost wishes she hadn’t recognized. “You’re not the first man to try to write me a song,” she says eventually. He wasn’t the second, either. Or the third. She sees all their faces. Artur, waiting a train station for a girl named Lana who didn’t exist. Kirill, drunkenly singing on the street, only to be thrown into the back of a police car. Vladilen, bleeding into the expensive carpet, her knife in his side. “All have failed.”

“I won’t,” he says, and the tone of his voice is that of _the_ American, of blind hope and determination, and Natasha almost laughs. She turns to face him. “You wait, Nat. I’m gonna be the one.”

“I inspire beginnings, not endings.”

“Not with me.”

“Clint…”

They aren’t talking about music anymore. The whir of the ceiling fan is more noticeable than before and the sheets are suddenly alien on her skin. How did this get so out of hand? Only a few months ago he kissed her for the first time, and now she perpetually smells his skin and he’s making oaths he swears he can keep. “Please,” he says, and he is almost begging.

She nods. “Okay.” And it is okay – it is truly, really _okay_ , for the first time in days – and that is what really scares her. She has had love affairs, and passionate nights, and some have been wonderful and some have been terrible, but they have never been _okay_.

Clint was all three. Wonderful, terrible, okay.


End file.
